The Book That Launched Kissinger's Career

In the early-to-mid 1950s, Henry Kissinger was a largely unknown graduate student and professor at Harvard University. Through his work with the Harvard International Seminar, his editorship of the quarterly journal Confluence, and his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), however, he met and interacted with leading foreign policy scholars and some current, former and future governmental officials, including Hans Morgenthau, Arnold Wolfers, Paul Nitze, Robert Bowie, Reinhold Niebuhr, Raymond Aron, Gordon Dean, and McGeorge Bundy. This led to his appointment to the CFR’s nuclear study group and, ultimately, to the publication of his second book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957.

As Niall Ferguson points out in his excellent new biography of Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy and two earlier articles Kissinger wrote in Foreign Affairs were Kissinger’s first substantive and public contributions to the field known as “strategic studies,” which emerged as a separate and specialized scholarly area as a result of the development and use of atomic weapons by the United States at the end of World War II, and the subsequent development of thermonuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union as part of the larger Cold War struggle.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the newly independent U.S. Air Force promoted and funded nuclear policy studies by the RAND Corporation and its strategic analysts in an effort to discern how nuclear weapons would affect the nation’s military strategy and grand strategy. The pioneers in this field of study included William T.R. Fox, Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, William Kaufmann, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, and, with the publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Henry Kissinger.

The book’s publication coincided with a growing criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s avowed doctrine of “massive retaliation,” and a growing concern among policymakers and the general public that the Soviet Union was moving ahead of the United States in missile technology. A few months after Kissinger’s book appeared in bookstores around the country, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik I, which foreshadowed the deployment of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and the emergence of a so-called “missile gap” between the Soviet Union and the United States. The timing of Kissinger’s book could not have been better.

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy enjoyed an initial printing of 70,000 copies and was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The New York Times and Washington Post informed readers that top policymakers were reading Kissinger’s book. Kissinger did several prominent book events and appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. He was emerging as an influential public intellectual and had attracted the attention of the wealthy and powerful Rockefeller family. Soon, the once obscure graduate student and Harvard professor was shuttling between Cambridge, New York and Washington, D.C., working as a professor, foreign policy scholar, and policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller.

Although Kissinger wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy nearly sixty years ago, it continues to be relevant to today’s world where a potential Russian adversary still fields thousands of nuclear weapons, China has announced its intention to place multiple independently-targeted nuclear warheads (so-called MIRVs) on its intercontinental ballistic missiles, rogue states like North Korea and Iran have or will likely acquire nuclear weapons and delivery systems, non-state terrorist organizations are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and the United States still extends its nuclear guarantee to its NATO allies and Japan. In other words, it is still necessary for policymakers and strategists to, in Herman Kahn’s memorable words, “think about the unthinkable,” which is precisely what Henry Kissinger did so well in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

Kissinger began the book by describing the challenge of the nuclear age as how to deal with an “excess of power.” “[W]e added the atomic bomb to our arsenal,” he explained, “without integrating its implications into our thinking.” Anticipating the theorists of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), Kissinger noted that the destructiveness of nuclear weapons caused many to believe that “war is no longer a conceivable instrument of policy and ... international disputes can be settled only by means of diplomacy.” That, Kissinger believed, was wishful thinking.

The development and use of nuclear weapon systems, Kissinger wrote, required a plausible strategic doctrine. The United States had to plan to wage all-out war, but also limited wars. “We must have the ability,” he explained, “to meet the whole spectrum of possible challenges and not only the most absolute one.” History proved, wrote Kissinger, that superior strategic doctrine is often the source of victory. “[T]he key to a proper doctrine,” he further explained, “is the correct understanding of the elements of one’s superiority and the ability to apply them more rapidly than the opponent.”

Kissinger understood that the nuclear competition between the United States and the Soviet Union could result in “nuclear stalemate,” but it would not necessarily deter other forms of conflict, including conventional wars and indirect proxy warfare. Moreover, any plausible strategic doctrine had to plan for waging limited war, including a limited nuclear war.

“[I]t is possible to conceive of a pattern of limited nuclear war,” Kissinger wrote, “with its own appropriate tactics and with limitations as to targets, areas, and the size of weapons used.” The United States should therefore develop lower-yield nuclear weapons with greater accuracy that could be used against military, rather than civilian, targets. He advocated using “the smallest amount of force consistent with achieving the objective  ...” Here, Kissinger was applying Clausewitz to nuclear war. War, even nuclear war, could be limited by the political objective of the war. The U.S., therefore, had to develop the military wherewithal to fight wars across the spectrum of conflict. “[W]e require,” he wrote, “a continuous spectrum of nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities.”

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was an indictment of the Eisenhower administration’s doctrine of massive retaliation—the threat to use nuclear weapons in an all-out attack on the Soviet Union in response to any form of Soviet aggression along its periphery. Such a threat, Kissinger believed, was not plausible and amounted to no more than strategic bluff. “A wise policy,” he concluded, “cannot rest on a threat that we are afraid to implement.”